Your service charges and rent

River Clyde Homes is looking for your views on the service and investment impact that potential rent increases would have from April 2023.

You've probably heard that between now and the end of March 2023, all rents – for social housing tenants and for private tenants – have been frozen by the Scottish Government as a result of the cost-of-living crisis. This hasn’t affected your rent yet, as housing associations only set rents once a year, every March/April.

The Scottish Government will advise early next year whether housing associations will be allowed to raise rents, if necessary, in 2023/24. However, both the Scottish Government and Scottish Housing Regulator have said that housing associations should still carry out our normal consultations with tenants on rents for next year. We will contact you for formal consultation once we know what the Scottish Government has decided.

How will we set your rent for next year?

As you know, housing associations are charities which exist to provide good quality homes at affordable rents. We will always do our best to keep your rents as low as possible. Despite inflation rates of 7% in March 2022, we were able to limit the rent increase to 3.8% for 2022/23, following your feedback.

The cost of living crisis affecting our tenants, and the many inflationary pressures which the association has been facing, make it especially important that our consultation with you finds the right balance between rent affordability and the need to maintain our services and continue investing in our homes. This includes things like replacing kitchens and bathrooms and further improving the energy efficiency of our homes to help limit your energy costs.

What should you do next?

The information below sets out the impact of some options for next year. We will hold several focus group sessions across Inverclyde. We are keen to gain your views on rent options, affordability, value for money and the impact they will have to the services we provide. The details of the sessions are as follows:

We have worked with two tenant organisations in preparing this communication. TPAS Scotland supports tenants and landlords to get involved in their communities. The Tenants Information Service (TIS) works with tenants and housing organisations to develop effective participation. You can contact either TPAS Scotland or TIS for more information on:

TPAS Scotland: www.tpasscotland.org.uk or 0141 552 3633

TIS: www.tis.org.uk or 0141 248 1242

Consultation over charges for wardens, caretaking services and factoring will take place separately with the relevant customers.

You can read about our 2021/22 performance in our published Annual Report. The report shows how every penny of rent money is spent. We feel it is important that you understand the impact rising costs are having on our budgets and what we can do too. Inflation and interest rate increases mean it costs more to carry out repairs, maintenance and investment works as materials, labour and contractor costs increase, more to pay for interest on loans and more for running costs such as our electricity and fuel. These cost pressures have a significant impact on our business planning and rent setting process for 2023/24.

One of the main considerations when proposing any inflationary increases to rents, is the current rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). CPI is commonly used in the housing sector and is the measure used to increase welfare benefits. The CPI rate has continued to increase significantly over the past year with October’s rate being 11.1%. We are still ambitious about our plans to improve the quality of our houses/your home and we know these are important but we also know you are concerned about rent increases at the same time as costs are increasing for food and energy.

We have identified rent options and established the impact that these would have on our services and investment:

Here’s an example of how a 5% increase would affect a typical tenement property:

We hope customers will let us know what they think of the options by attending one of our focus group sessions.

If you are worried about paying your rent, please get in touch with us straight away, so we can talk about how we can help. You can contact our Customer Experience Team on 0800 013 2196.